Points & the Machines
The machines are the other half of surviving. They dispense weapons, drinks and upgrades, they take a currency called points, and everything they do is loud.
Points
Points are a shared crew pool. Not a wallet each. There is one number and all of you spend from it, which means every purchase is a conversation and some of those conversations are arguments. That is deliberate — the question of who drinks first is one of the things this game is about.
You earn them in the field:
| For | Points |
|---|---|
| A shambler or a sprinter put down | 10 |
| A beast — a hellhound — put down | 25 |
| Armour put down, or a room held through a full escalation step | 50 |
| A named elite put down, or a site objective completed | 100 |
| Getting a downed crew member back up | 15 |
| Covering the door on a retreat you chose to make | 25 |
Assists and kills are the same event. It all goes to the pool.
A crew earns somewhere around 200 to 350 points in a session. Every price below is set against that number, so read them as fractions of an evening rather than as sums of money.
What things cost
| Thing | Cost | Noise |
|---|---|---|
| A perk from a machine | 25–60 | quiet |
| A weapon off the wall | 15–75 | quiet |
| Refilling a weapon at its own wall | half its price | quiet |
| One spin of the Mystery Box | 95 | +1 threat |
| Firing an electro-shock trap | 50 | +1 threat |
| Pack-a-Punch, per weapon | 500 | +1 threat |
The quiet purchases are the wall and the perks. Everything else tells the building where you are. You can be safe or you can be strong, and getting strong is what raises the site's threat level. There is no version of this where you get both for free.
The wall
Weapons clamped flat to the plaster with a price stencilled beside them. No shopkeeper, no till. The clamp opens when the points are there.
Buying is straightforward. The rule people forget is the refill: standing at the wall of a weapon you are already carrying reloads it and adds one to the crew's ammunition pool for half the painted price. It only works at the right wall, which is why learning the map is worth as much as learning the rules.
You can carry two weapons. Three with Mule Kick. A third means putting one down where you stand, and where you stand is where the horde is going.
The Mystery Box
A banded wooden crate with a question mark on the lid. Ninety-five points, and it opens by itself.
Ninety-five is more than any perk on the wall. Every spin is a Juggernog somebody chose not to drink, and you should feel that every time.
You pay, the waltz plays — and everything dead in the building can hear it, so the site's threat level goes up by one — and then the GM rolls 2d6. There is no skill involved and no way to improve your chances. The box is the one thing in this system nobody gets to be good at.
Most spins give you something decent off the wall's top shelf. Some give you something you could have bought for a quarter of the price. Rarely it gives you hardware that is not for sale anywhere. Very rarely it gives you a wonder weapon, and that is what the ninety-five is really for.
And on a natural 2 it gives you a small brown teddy bear, keeps your points, and leaves. It also leaves after its fifth spin in one place, whatever it has given you. Count the spins — knowing you have two left changes what you do with them.
Whatever rises out of the box hangs there for one exchange. Whoever takes it, takes it. Including somebody who did not pay.
Pack-a-Punch
Five hundred points to turn a weapon into its upgraded form — a different weapon with a different name and different numbers, not a bonus on the old one.
The money is not the hard part. The machine needs the site's power on and all three teleporter pads linked, and linking a pad costs 5 exposure to whoever stands on it. Fifteen exposure out of the crew before you have spent a point, and another 5 every time you use it.
That ordering is the whole tone of this game: the machine that makes you stronger is the machine that takes your perks away. Every 20 exposure burns a perk slot, and when it burns you lose the perk in it, and nothing gives it back.
Budget for it anyway. Five hundred points is a two-session goal and it changes what you are capable of.
The traps
Some sites have things wired into the walls that kill for you. Electro-shock posts in a doorway: fifty points, one exchange, and everything below beast tier that walks into it stops existing. Against a hound pack it is the best fifty points in the game. Against three shamblers it is forty-five points more than a magazine.
They do not distinguish. If you are in the doorway when it fires, it kills you too.
What none of it does
No machine gives points back. No machine refunds a perk. Nothing in this economy pays out except the field.
You will spend a session earning three hundred points and watch two hundred of them evaporate into a crate that gave somebody a rifle they already owned. That is not the system going wrong. That is the machines, doing exactly what they were put there to do.